Comments
Captioned “The Marriage,” this engraving illustrates a passage from this abolitionist novel by a Congregationalist author from Connecticut; it may be based on actual travels through Virginia in the late antebellum period. In this scene, the white mistress is compelling her enslaved maid, Mina, to marry in a manner that Mina did not recognize as a proper marriage. The mistress exclaims that if Mina “had been willing and obedient” she would have “made you a pretty wedding in the parlor, and would have called the clergyman in” (pp. 169-170).